Wicked British Satire With a Breaking Heart / Novel skewers the greedy ruling class and its pretenders

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, February 12, 1995

THE WINSHAW LEGACY

Jonathan Coe's fourth novel, "The Winshaw Legacy," his first to be published in the United States, offers us a wickedly breezy view of postwar Britain as typified by one greedy, ruthless and mercifully imaginary English family, the
Winshaws of Winshaw Towers
.

The Winshaws go back a long way, beginning as robber barons and ending up in the 1990s as, well, robber barons. That is to say, bankers, politicians, arms salesmen, art dealers and media trend-setters.

Like so much that Coe cherishes about Britain, the best of the Winshaws -- the golden boy, young Godfrey -- died in the Second World War, betrayed by his brother for business reasons. If the earlier generation of Winshaws are unsavory, their heirs are worse. Banker Thomas, politician Henry, arms salesman Mark simply go where the smell of money takes them; idolized columnist Hilary Winshaw despises not only the people she writes for but also the very words she writes or speaks on television; she knows it's all poppycock, as does her art dealer brother Roddy, smugly ignorant about art. And they're all rich.

The main character in "The Winshaw Legacy" is not a Winshaw, thank goodness, but a young novelist whose stalled career has been rescued by a commission to write a biography of the family. The novelist in question, Michael Owen, has been obsessed with an English film of the early '60s, "What a Carve Up!," ever since he caught a glimpse of Shirley Eaton, the film's Grace Kelly-like ingenue, during a visit to the cinema when he was 10 years old.

The film is no invention: It was an unremarkable but very English comedy-horror movie featuring the very English talents of such postwar artistes as Sid James and Kenneth Connor, camping their way around a creepy mansion where a family assembles for the reading of a will, only to fall victim, one by one, to a mysterious killer. Film buffs who recall Bob Hope in "The Cat and the Canary" will recognize the genre.

The role of "What a Carve Up!" in "The Winshaw Legacy" is pleasingly elaborate. The film functions as a stylistic template for the novel, whose characters and plot mimic the crude but hearty British movie satires of 30 years ago (the period of "I'm All Right, Jack"), in which class comedy can be seen dissolving under the acid realization that every Brit is on the make, no matter what his origins. The climax of "The Winshaw Legacy," in which a will is read to the Winshaw survivors at creepy old Winshaw Towers, re-creates the world of "What a Carve Up!" itself . Furthermore, Winshaw family biographer Owen's tacky voyeuristic passion for rerunning and freeze-framing old movies is shared by banker Thomas Winshaw, one of Owen's subjects. Owen hates the Winshaws and all they stand for, yet like them he is neurotically in thrall to his childhood. You get the feeling that in Coe's Britain the impotent and the greedy are linked in their final, indissoluble Englishness only by a helpless nostalgia for a more innocent and more erotically charged country: the past.

Unlike such harsher novelists as Will Self, Coe is still touched by Britain's failures, and angered by them too. He isn't cynical, and although the cast of characters in "The Winshaw Legacy" leaves us with little enough hope for Britain's future, the reader knows that idealism isn't dead as long as novels like this are written and published.

Coe's plain man's slapstick has heart, and its heart is breaking over the ideals that have turned sour in the past 30 years. The most poignant and at the same time the most potently literary conceit in the book is its threnody for the world's first space hero, Yuri Gagarin. Newsreels of Gagarin's epic flight preceded the films on which Owen is so fixated, and he guards the memory of both the real and the imaginary heroes of his youth.

Gagarin's mysterious early death -- his plane fell out of the sky -- may or may not have been caused by a KGB resentful of Gagarin's fascination for the West. But with the lyrical, articulate, charismatic Gagarin died the romance of space exploration, and with it the simplicity of one of humanity's loveliest and most ancient yearnings. That's what Coe is at pains to remind us.

Inside his brisk, unpretentious satire lies a powerful idea, as yet dimly perceived by other commentators: that the later '60s and '70s of our century, so commonly regarded as its erotic climax, were in fact its funeral pyre, a lurid diversion, and that it is the preceding decade that holds the key to our last good dreams.